IndieWeb Appreciation

This past weekend I attended the second IndieWeb Summit in Portland. This was my fifth IndieWebCamp event, which got me thinking about the things that keep me coming back.

One thing I appreciate about the IndieWeb community is that we don’t tell people to use one piece of software that’s going to Save the World and Meet All of Your Needs™. Instead, we encourage you to use what works for you. This results in a diversity of personal sites and software that is on full display at an IndieWebCamp event. Check out the variety in this year’s attendee introductions. By using some IndieWeb building blocks, many of these sites are able to interact directly with each other (commenting, liking, RSVPing, etc.) while looking very different and running different CMS software — or none at all!

Another thing I appreciate is that it’s a welcoming community that strives to not just be for developers. We want to make it easier for everyone to have a personal site and own their data, without requiring them to be a developer. There isn’t a snobbery about whether one can write code or not. We’re always working to lower the barriers to entry.

Finally, the community has fun. In our chat channel we have a helpful bot, Loqi, that answers questions based on the wiki. This is mostly for serious stuff, but of course I have helped add some silliness to it. If you ask “What is love?” in chat, Loqi responds with “baby don’t hurt me . . . ” ♫ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEXWRTEbj1I. Another bit of fun is the chicken post type that Ben Werdmüller pioneered. You know, so you can post chickens on your site. Speaking of Ben, check out the new neon theme on his site.

I intended this post to be a summary of the weekend. It quickly became more of a community appreciation post, which is totally fine. Thankfully there’s lots of video from the event. I recommend starting with the keynotes. The schedule page has video for each of the sessions. I also recommend the Sunday demos; those are all things people accomplished on their personal site at the Summit!

If you’re interested in having a personal website and owning more of your content, you should definitely join us in chat and consider coming to an IndieWebCamp event or Homebrew Website Club meetup.

Previously: IndieWeb Summit Day 1 (2016)